vsprintf: ignore %n again

This ignores %n in printf again, as was originally documented.
Implementing %n poses a greater security risk than utility, so it should
stay ignored.  To help anyone attempting to use %n, a warning will be
emitted if it is encountered.

Based on an earlier patch by Joe Perches.

Because %n was designed to write to pointers on the stack, it has been
frequently used as an attack vector when bugs are found that leak
user-controlled strings into functions that ultimately process format
strings.  While this class of bug can still be turned into an
information leak, removing %n eliminates the common method of elevating
such a bug into an arbitrary kernel memory writing primitive,
significantly reducing the danger of this class of bug.

For seq_file users that need to know the length of a written string for
padding, please see seq_setwidth() and seq_pad() instead.

Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>
Cc: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp>
Cc: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Git-commit: 9196436ab2f713b823a2ba2024cb69f40b2f54a5
Git-repo: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git
CRs-fixed: 665291
Change-Id: Id191acaf66e3c395df92b0a77331269b525e3cad
Signed-off-by: David Brown <davidb@codeaurora.org>
1 file changed